I’ve been using Twitter for a good while now but have been such a slacker in actually using it.  While in San Francisco I made a pledge to be more active on Twitter.

For those who don’t know what Twitter is, let me explain.

Twitter, in brief, is a social network based on instant messages to a public audience.  You “twit” when you are going to a movie, when you’re stuck at the DMV (as I have been twice in the past week) or when you want company for dinner.

As people discover your tweets, they have the option to follow you.  By following you, they will receive all of your updates to Twitter on their email, their phone, their IM or whatever other format they choose.
You can direct “tweets” at something by typing @ before the person’s name.  If I wanted to ask Nick Starr out to dinner, I might say, “@NickStarr want to get dinner at Sapporo?” and he could reply “@justex07 yeah, how about 8?”.

I could also put an open invitation for people to join me at a movie by simply twittering, “going to see the 10 o’clock showing of Wanted if anyone wants to join me”.  All of your followers will get the message and can reply to you if they plan on joining.

As you begin to acquire get a large number of followers, you essentially make it impossible to be lonely.  During South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin last year, people were Twittering about the best Bar-B-Que and ending up with over 40 people joining them at places like Stub’s for dinner!

Strangers uniting in a Web 2.0 world.  It’s something else.  It’s something great.

With the iPhone 3G coming out and all of the Twitter Apps expected in the iPhone 2.0 App Store, twitting on the go will just get easier and easier.

I am going to be researching good Twitter plugins so I can have my tweets streaming through this blog on the sidebar.  If you know of any good ones, please forward them to me through a comment on this post.

If you want to follow me on Twitter, my name is justex07 and you can find me on Twitter here.